What is the benefit of planting trees in triangles?
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
10 November 2013
Three years ago (July 2010), I suggested in this column that farmers can improve the yield from their land by simply changing the planting pattern from the common square grid to a triangular one. I used the example of cabbages and demonstrated that the triangular pattern accommodates about 16 per cent more plants.
Now Michael Chege has pulled that article from his archives and is trying to figure out “how this triangular business can be applied when the normal pattern is rectangular”.
He writes: “I want to plant trees on my farm and I have been advised space them by 1m in a row and the rows to be 2m apart. How can I convert this into a triangular patter and how many extra trees can I get?”
Chege, let’s do the analysis on one hectare of land, that is, a piece measuring 100m by 100m. If you use the rectangular pattern, you will fit 100 trees per row (spaced by 1m) and a total of 50 rows (rows are 2m apart). That makes a total of 5,000 trees.
To change the pattern to triangles, you start by planting the first row of 100 trees, 1m apart. The second row trees are shifted so that they are aligned with the midpoints of those in the first row.
The second row is then brought closer to the first so that the distance between its trees and those in the first is the recommended 2m. The result will be trees forming isosceles triangles with two sides of 2m and the third being 1m. But the second row will now have 99 trees instead of 100. This pattern is repeated throughout the one hectare.
The next question then is: what it the distance between the rows? The answer is that it is equal to the height of the triangles. A little trigonometry reveals that the rows are 1.94m apart (compare that to the 2m in a rectangular pattern).
Next we find out how many rows will fit in the 100m width of the plot. This comes to 51. Thus there will be 26 rows of 100 trees and 25 rows of 99. The total number trees come to 5,075. The question for Chege then is whether 75 extra trees are worth the triangular troubles.
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